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Our sense of free will, or as some
people like to think of it, their independent consciousness and ego,
has never really had a great press as far as most religions have been
concerned. But in the 1970s, it also got a bad jolt from the world of
science. That was when Benjamin Libet, a researcher in the physiology
department of the University of California, San Francisco, and a pioneering
scientist in the field of human consciousness, started analysing the results
of some of his experiments. Libet had wired up a group of volunteers to
electro-encephalograph and other brain scan machines and told them to make
random motions such as pressing a button, or flexing a finger or wrist
within a certain time frame.
He was
simply looking for an objective method of marking a person's conscious
experience. of the decision to perform an action, and afterward comparing
this information with data recording the brain's electrical activity during
the same time period. Normally we tend to believe that a person first thinks
of doing something, and that subsequently the thought process is transformed
into electrical impulses in the brain which signal the required muscles to
carry out the act. Imagine Libet's surprise, therefore, when he discovered
that brain signals associated with the actions occurred about half a second
before the subject consciously thought about deciding to make them!
The experiments have been repeated several times
since then with the same results. It shows that the idea of having any
ownership over our actions is merely an illusion. In reality, our will or
ego is only a second level player which gets into the activity loop at a
slightly later stage when the action has already been set into motion. It
also makes a mockery of free-will as we understand it. Scientists have since
tried to rescue free-will by saying that even though we don't have a hand in
initiating action, our consciousness still retains veto powers over it. They
say this happens when we stop ourselves from performing some unconscious
urge. But here too there's a problem. The difference in time between the
onset of the of the action and the will to act is about 200 milliseconds ---
hardly enough time to take significant remedial action.
Does this mean we're all living under the
delusion that we happen to be masters of our destiny ? Perhaps, but the more
interesting implication could be that a higher self is really in charge.
It's something spiritual masters have been trying to tell us for a while
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